DEVENIR NOMADA

Deleuze and Guattari identify the potential for resistance in this process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Importantly, this may be a consequence of either an individual’s reflexivity or the actions of another. Either way, it can provide what they call (1988: 9) a line of flight by which the BwO escapes from a territorialization. Often the de-territorialization is momentary and perhaps inconsequential: the BwO moves just a little from its previous position before re-territorializing in a new patterning. At other times, it may be substantial and life-changing, a line of flight which carries the BwO into unimagined realms of possibility and becoming-other. To give two examples: a patient’s BwO may be de-territorialized by the health care worker or friend who treats them as something more than a collection of pathologies; the child’s BwO may be deterritorialized (and reterritorialized) by the adult who treats her as an equal.

Such lines of flight can lead to what Deleuze and Guattari describe as nomadic subjectivity. All deterritorializations carry the trace of the nomadic in them, but Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between relative and absolute deterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 55). Because the relation between a person and her environment is dynamic and challenging, movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization are commonplace: part of the daily fabric of existence, part of the unfolding and becoming-other character of life and death, health and illness. Deterritorialization can be seen clearly in relation to sickness and mortality. Thus a risk to health from some environmental factor leads to a change in behaviour; an illness or impairment forces a person to adapt and exploit unused potentialities. In each case there is relative deterritorialization of the BwO. But these relative deterritorializations, even if they are very rapid or very extreme, rarely (perhaps never) result in an absolute line of flight, the absolute deterritorialization of the BwO which Deleuze and Guattari call nomadism.

This metaphor of the nomad exemplifies absolute deterritorialization. Nomads may follow customary paths, but the points along the way possess no intrinsic significance for them. They do not mark out territory to be distributed among people (as with sedentary cultures), rather people are distributed in an open space without borders or enclosures. Nomad space is smooth, without features, and in that sense the nomad traverses without movement, the land ceases to be other than support. Unlike the migrant, the nomad does not leave land because it has become hostile: rather she clings to the land because it is undifferentiated from other spaces she inhabits (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 380-1).

Nomadism is not just a life-style choice, however. Deleuze and Guattari (ibid: 23) see nomadology as an alternative approach to understanding the history of civilisation. Traditionally, history has been written from the point of view of the sedentary, from which has grown all the apparatus of the State, including ‘state philosophy’ (Massumi 1992: 4-5), the official version of how to live and die. Nomadology - in contrast -- multiplies narratives; creating an uninterrupted flow of deterritorialization which establishes a line of flight away from territories, grand designs and monolithic institutions. Needless to say, this is not something which is achieved once and for all, there is always another and another deterritorialization ahead.

Thus nomadism must be thought of not as an outcome but as a process, as a line of flight which continually resists the sedentary, the single fixed perspective. Again recall that Foucault (1977: 148) spoke of the body completely imprinted with history -- that is, the forces of the social. Nomadology sets itself in opposition to this inscription: nomad subjectivity is one free to roam, untrammelled by the territorializations of power, and free to resist. As such, a commitment to deterritorialization and the nomad is intrinsically political, always on the side of freedom, choice and becoming, always opposed to power, territory and the fixing of identity.

# posted by alvaro @ 3:22 a. m.